I’m pretty consistently behind the curve on most things. It took three years for me to get into The Office and American Idol. Serenity was already made and on DVD before I was introduced to Firefly. And it’s taken me until now – 2011 – to notice The Cure (I know, I know! Told you.)
In short, I’m not what you’d call “cool”, even by geek standards.
I finally gave up on Netscape Navigator (again, I know, I know!!) sometime in the late 90s, and went with IE. But I’ve been hearing about FireFox and Chrome for what now seems like a gajillionty years. I’m finally taking this opportunity to ask: What’s so great about FF or Chrome that you’re willing to go out and install it specifically instead of using the browser that COMES with Windows? (Which I presume a majority of you use, being SQL people.)
IE has bookmarks. And security settings. And as of a couple of versions ago, tabs, and the ability to bookmark and call up groups of tabs. It has a bunch of stuff I don’t use, and the ability to turn off the annoying stuff. And it’s already on everything I own.
So, explain it to me. And while you’re thinking, enjoy this topical video that’s entertained my kids for five years now.
Happy days,
Jen McCown, Soooper Geeeeenius
http://www.MidnightDBA.com/Jen
The add-ons will automatically block ads (haven’t seen a web ad in years), automatically force HTTPS on social sites to prevent cookie hijacking, and sync bookmarks across all my computers.
I’m with Brent, lots of useful add-ons. Web-based GMail is *much* more tolerable with GMail redesigned (from Globex), for example, and fireFTP is a great embedded FTP client, which Microsoft has punted again and again. Most importantly, no dealing with stupid IE ESC and trusted sites to go anywhere. I opened a browser to browse, just let me do it already.
Back in the day I used Netscape out of a kinda of protest against the man. (Microsoft).
Then Firefox came along with (as previously mentioned several times) the add on features.
Chrome is what FF was in it’s early stages. New light weight and fast!
I have to use IE at work because I am not an admin on my own desktop. Seems they don’t trust me. So I use FF Portable and run it off my network drive. 🙂 Seems they were right not to trust me.
“America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eleanor_Roosevelt
Really though it is about speed. IE was slow and was crap for development compliance (there’s a reason Microsoft is asking everyone to stop using IE6, for the love of all that’s holy please stop). Chrome has been my default browser for well over a year. Before that it was Firefox but as FF grew in popularity it too got bloated and slow. Now IE9 is out and I’ve been quite impressed by it but there are a few quirky things that annoy me that still gravitate me towards Chrome. Firefox 4 was released today and its had an overhaul of its interface and once again it is Ricky Bobby types of fast so we’ll see how it all plays out.
For me personally it is speed. I use firefox and it loads my home page zoo much faster than IE even starts up that it is staggering. The other large part for me, as a web dev, is that it conforms so much better to HTML and JavaScript standards than IE does. I code a page to work in firefox, then I go back and tweak it until it works in IE (unfortunately too many people still use IE for me to not have to make everything work for it.).
I tried chrom for a while and it is the fastest, but I have noticed that a lot of web pages stills do not render quite right on chrome. It was annoying enough that I went back to firefox and I have stayed there for years.
Don’t get me wrong IE has come a long way since version 6, but it still does not support so many parts of css3 that it is really annoying having it still be the most common browser out there.
Give it an honest try and I guarantee that you will be sold on another browser.
For me it’s all about rendering. IE has gotten a lot better at this in recent releases, but I still see a lot of web pages that don’t render correctly in IE.
Chrome is my go-to browser for most things, and it’s excellent though it has a few flaws (like it doesn’t make raw XML files pretty), but Gmail is excellent in it (and you get pop-ups when emails come in!). I can keep it open all day without it crashing, which I don’t think I’ve ever been able to do in IE. When Chrome doesn’t work quite right, I use Firefox. I rarely open IE unless I’m looking at something MS-specific that I know will render best there, but those things are few and far between these days…
On the advice of Erika Bakse and Eric Wisdah at SQL Saturday Tampa in January, I tried out Chrome. SO MUCH FASTER! Also, it has bookmarks too; it just takes a while to get used to their new location. You know how I am, (not much of a true geek either), and I am a convert.
Wisdahl. Forgot the L
What they said 😉
Seriously though, IE hasn’t always been all that and a bag of chips, although 8 is decent and 9 reportedly pretty damn good. In ye olden dayes, Firefox used to actually work FOR you, and not fight with you like IE6 et al did. Chrome is a new addition, and I just started using it for speed, no other good reason.
Quite frankly I’m surprised that you survived the from about 2004 – 2008 using I.E. It was awful! Now, it’s still not as good as chrome or firefox, but at least it’s closer. (Disclaimer: I haven’t really given IE 9 a chance yet… soon)
Add-ins and speed are the main reason for using the other browsers. For me, it was the ad-blocker and flash-block add-ins that convinced me to move long ago. I’ll decide when video plays in my web browser thank you very much! Plus, as of sometime in january, Tweetdeck for chrome is better than the stand alone app. (I wasn’t getting replies or DMs with the stand alone app)
To each his (or her) own…
Aside from the fact that FireFox doesn’t give script errors as frequently as IE, the one thing I love about FF is that it’ll run as a PortableApp. Meaning that I have EXACTLY the same browser settings (bookmarks, cache contents and open windows) on every machine I run Dropbox on (so work laptop, home desktop and netbook).
Still use IE though, as some things need domain authentication (such as dynamics crm)….
I started using Chrome as my primary browser shortly after it came out. I like it for three reasons. First, it’s FAST – much faster than other browsers. Second, it’s incredibly stable since it runs each tab in its own process; plug-ins (i.e., Flash) are also isolated so they cannot crash the browser. Finally, Google has gotten rid of a lot of the excessive toolbars and icons that characterize both IE and Firefox nowadays, resulting in a lightweight interface that gets out of the way. Less important but still noteworthy is that Google updates Chrome frequently (and silently) for both security patches and new features.
Funny you should mention this topic. I installed IE 9 over the weekend, hoping it was as fast as they claimed it was. I really wanted it to be “all that”.
The first page I attempted to load using IE9? midnightdba.com. FREEZE, CRASH, BOOM. Tried on a different machine. FREEZE, CRASH, BOOM. To hell with IE 9, I’m sorry I even entertained the notion!
I used to love FF, before it came bloated, slow, and worst of all, hella-unstable. Chrome is definitely the fastest I’ve used and what I use 95% of the time, but I really don’t like it much.
From a web development perspective, IE used to be terrible. IE6 wasn’t following the WC3 standards as they were being developed and modified, and Microsoft really took some major steps in 7, 8 and now 9, to bring their browser up to code, as it were. Being able to code a site one way, without all the exceptions and hacks for the IE idiosyncrasies, is a great advantage. Back in the day when IE was more prevalent, web coders would go through two stage development, the MOSe stage (coding for the compliant browsers, such as Mozilla, Opera, Safari) and then going back and tweaking for IE. Really, it’s about future proofing the web, because while everything might work fine and dandy today, when all the standard are implemented, it may brake later.
Years ago, I started using Firefox because of the tabs.
I’m still keeping it for a few reasons:
– I use to test the sites I develop in IE and in Firefox – they are the browsers people use most. See also what Matt Velic says above.
– I really like the Error Console (Tools —> Error Console). This is the quickest way I can discover javascript errors. I do not like javascript very much; therefore I deal only with simple situations, and the Error Console helps me a lot.
– I cannot convince IE to give up the “friendly” error messages. I disabled “show friendly HTTP error messages” in Tools —> Internet Options —> Advanced to no avail. Firefox shows “real” error messages and from this point you can start investigating what’s happening.
I bounce between FF and Chrome. I haven’t used Windows at home for several years now. Chrome loads fast and is less resourse intense than IE. I use Ff for the FireFTP plugin ( which is amazingly easy to use). Both Chrome and FF have built in ad blockers and monitor cookies a LOT better than IE.
I was a big fan of FF with all of it’s awesome add-ons (no ads being the biggie), but then I ran into the same problem that annoys the crap out of me with IE – footprint. I can generally run way more tabs on Chrome with each using less resources than it’s IE and FF counterpoints. While this may not be as big of a deal on a shiny new machine, I tend to only get new machines only when I.absolutely.have.to. (My beloved 4 year laptop is beginning to edge that way.) So 90% of stuff I use Chrome for because I am a tab maniac.
Chromes biggest downfall will be that it doesn’t work properly with all pages. In particular I have noticed that I often have problems with PDFs and occasionally on some more advanced websites. Also, developers don’t usually develop for Chrome, so occasionally you see small differences. In those cases I use IE, but my preference is still Chrome.
FF has cool add-ons that I love, including some great RSS feed stuff and tools that are great for research, but over the years the footprint has become huge. It’s rare that I use it unless specifically for an add-on that I want.
IE has always given me problems when I use it as my front line browser and in my experience it was just too unstable for as many tabs as I like to have open. When one crashed they all did and that in itself became too much of a deterrent.
Support standards and avoid security issues. Run FF with ‘noscript’ addon.
Thanks, all! I’m glad to finally get the inside skinny on what the big difference is!
Chrome is simple, comfy, and fast. I love how it auto-updates for me. I love that I can drag a tab out from the herd into its own window. I love that I DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO IT AT ALL. It’s like getting to stick your head straight into the internet and not having to look through a window.
PS: I can’t stop laughing at Jorge’s comment.
PPS: “The Love Cats” is my favorite Cure song. I’m always nostalgic for black eyeliner and being 16 when I hear it. Two thumbs up.